Not even hours after Seagate publically announced the company would unveil its 1TB hard drive sometime in the first half of 2007, Hitachi Global Storage has announced its 1TB drive. Like Seagate, Hitachi GST claims the drive will be available in the second quarter of 2007.

The 1TB Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 is just one of the drives in Hitachi's scope for next week's Consumer Electronics Show. The company also announced its 750GB Deskstar 7K750, CinemaStar 7K750 and CinemaStar 7K1000. Hitachi CinemaStar hard drives are specifically designed for digital video players and home-theater PCs.

Both Serial ATA and Parallel ATA versions of the new high-density monsters will make appearances. The drives spin at 7,200 revolutions per minute with an average seek time of 8.7 milliseconds. The SATA version of the Deskstar 7K1000 will feature a 32MB read head.

"The industry's first one-terabyte hard drive represents a milestone that is 50 years in the making, and it reasserts the hard drive's leadership as the highest-capacity, lowest-cost storage technology," said Shinjiro Iwata, chief marketing officer, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. "In the 51st year, Hitachi is leading a new era for hard drives -- not only providing large amounts of affordable storage, but also customizing and optimizing hard drives to deliver products that are smarter, more durable and more useful to the consumer."

Seagate's Barracuda 7200.10 750GB drive launched with an MSRP of $499 in the middle of last year. Hitachi has bold claims for the Deskstar 7K1000 -- the company claims it will launch with a price tag of $399, or just under $0.40 per gigabyte.

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